Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament and member of the European People’s Party, David McAllister, arrived in Armenia on a regional visit with a delegation of 6 people. Last week, at a joint press conference with the Chairman of the NA Standing Committee on Foreign Relations, Eduard Aghajanyan, journalists asked David McAllister: the other day, Azerbaijan and the EU signed an agreement in the energy sector, and now there are criticisms of Europe, which emphasizes democracy, whether democracy and human rights were important to you.
If they were important, why did you make an agreement with Azerbaijan, taking into account that not only in Azerbaijan human rights are grossly violated, but also the Aliyev regime is the author of war crimes, the last fresh cases occurred in 2020 in the sovereign territory of Armenia and Artsakh. McAllister replied, “You follow the developments and you saw that the President of the European Commission was in Baku on Monday.
This agreement we signed with Azerbaijan is about energy resources and the challenge we face in Europe is that for obvious reasons we have to limit and reduce gas imports from Russia in Europe because we want to be less dependent on Russian gas and we want to pay less, because if we buy resources from Russia, we are indirectly financing aggression and war against Ukraine. Therefore, we need to diversify our energy supplies, especially since we have not yet gone fully renewable in the EU, which would make us completely independent.
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Therefore, we will still be dependent on these supplies in the long run. The alternative of energy carriers coming from Russia is Qatar, Algeria, or Azerbaijan. Therefore, the agreement we have signed to increase gas supplies from Azerbaijan is on the subject of the EU. But the issues that you have highlighted are beyond the realm of energy cooperation and here we have very different existing frameworks and I must assure you that we will continue to address issues that relate to human rights or other issues in Azerbaijan as we have done. We will do it in the future as well.”
Hripsime JEBEJYAN
